Koji – App Development Platform | Hacker News Reader

Koji – App Development Platform

withkoji.com

64 pointscardamomo21 comments

Watched a talk that the CEO gave, and he describes it by analogy to YouTube. (he was formerly at Google, CTO of MySpace, and founder of Veoh (an early YouTube competitor).

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitry-shapiro-a2b1/

Before YouTube, it was difficult and expensive to broadcast video. YouTube made it effortless, and therefore a bunch of people showed up and created all kinds of things... Some are stupid and weird, others are very lucrative for the creators.

He says that Koji wants to do the same thing for code/apps/interactive content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q22bQuiY874

Hi everyone, co-founder/lead dev here. We've been working on Koji for the past six months or so, inspired by the idea of democratizing the creation of interactive content (apps, "mini programs", whatever you want to call them) in the same way that YouTube democratized the creation of interactive video. -- we're still in beta and there are lots of rough edges, but it's nonetheless exciting to wake up and see it on here :)

Happy to answer any questions!

PS - My cofounder (https://twitter.com/dmitry) and I met five years ago here on HN!

Your site is completely un-usable with umatrix on default settings. This isn't a complaint and I expect things to break with umatrix, but I thought you should know.

Pretty excited about what you are working on. If you can get this up and running at critical mass it could be HUGE!

I would have dismissed something like this in the past — it seems to be just template + community. But now I undertand that the social context matters a great deal, so it seems interesting!

How does it compare to Glitch, which seems to be trying to achieving the same thing, however? And ObservableHQ? (though the focus seems different there)

Thanks! And yeah, I think the timing really feels right for something like this in a way that wasn't the case even a year or so ago.

In addition to the published apps on the discovery side of the platform, we've made a significant investment in tech that enables creators/makers to develop and remix apps in a new way (including spinning up "remote localhost" containers for development; building a collaborative online editor with a unique editing experience that lifts no-code visual abstractions from the underlying code; integrated deploy/CI for both frontends and backends; and other goodies like support for custom domains with automatic HTTPS). This video shows some of that in action [0].

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5uoqPFInlY&feature=youtu.be...

From the vision document:

> This fundamentally changes the equations that drive the app economy, turning it from one where a few players build monolithic services that chase billions of DAUs, to a creator economy where everyone is empowered to use tech to solve their own problems and express themselves creatively.

I question this premise. The internet of today != the internet of 20 years ago. Traffic is primarily driven by progressively fewer and fewer sites.

The problem of an app "surviving" today isn't about the cost of app development. It's blitzscaling. You need light billions of dollars on fire to maintain your position as an Uber. No SWE can quit their FANG job and make that happen anymore, with their own money. They'll need VC Money.

Also, the average user downloads 0 new apps per month. I know I'm definitely the average user. Because all the apps are competing for my attention and send garbage push notifications, I turn off push notifications. As a user, I want less apps, not more.

I think you’re on to something when it comes to discovery, but if you have a known audience with a need/want to fill, driving down the cost of development opens up the huge world of situated software [1], where the ROI rebalances itself to enable developers to add niche value again.

[1] http://shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/situated_softw...

A lot of business have your niche or micro localization. It don't become a unicorn, but can make money sufficiently to be a life style business. As some saas are like grocery store.

Maybe the author is talking about this type of "local/nich tech business"... No?

Watched a talk that the CEO gave, and he describes it by analogy to YouTube.

He says that Koji wants to do the same thing for code/apps/interactive content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q22bQuiY874

This is a very fair point. Many successful businesses are not multi-billion dollar unicorns. I think the question then is, can an aggregator for software-based lifestyle businesses make Koji itself a billion-dollar platform? I'm curious to see where it will go.

And i was thinking about [fedora's koji](https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/), which is not that far off.

This feels like people are starting out with simple apps (kind of like YouTube started with stupid pet tricks), and will be interesting to see if they start to get better at it.

This looks great so far. Eager to hear from all the people who are going to point out the other platforms that are similar so I can learn about them too.

Glitch, Scratch, Tynker

reminds me a lot of glitch, except the apps you can remix on koji are more ‘fully baked’ .. also cool that it has everything from full code access to no-code tools

Fake job listings to get developers to add to their templates collection is common practice for them. Terrible company.

Hm, I couldn't find where to start a new project from scratch.

https://withkoji.com/create

Only the js community could be so self-centered to assume that everyone will just assume which language is being used for their platform....

Yep, it's js.

Can you please not take HN threads into programming language flamewars? Or any flamewars. We're trying for a bit better than that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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